Portraits of a Monster: Robert Walpole and Early English Prose Fiction

Abstract

ANYONE WHO PROPOSES TO DISCUSS the subject of Walpole and English Prose Fiction has some explaining to do. The great prime minister was not a novelist, not a writer at all. He was, in the phrases of his day, His Honour, Sir Bob, the Great Man, a politician of splendid abilities and notorious corruptions whose presence dominated Parliament and the English court from the early 1 720s to the early 1 740s, justifying his place of prominence in the English history books. Nevertheless, the figure of Robert Walpole has properly engaged the attention of people interested in literary history, most notably Bertrand A. Goldgar, whose Walpole and the Wits (1976) shows us just how it was that political matters in the age of Walpole so greatly affected the works of Swift, Gay, Pope, Thomson, Fielding, and some lesser poets and playwrights, helping to determine what they wrote, why they wrote it, and how it was received. ' The connections between the worlds of politics and literature were already established by the time Walpole came to power, of course. Indeed, as H. T. Dickinson has observed, these relationships have scarcely ever been closer than in the early eighteenth century.2 They grew particularly intense beginning in the 1720s. The powerful tensions between the Walpole government and the energetic Opposition, the supposed political and moral outrages of the prime minister himself, the domestic policies of the administration and-especially-its negative attitude toward the arts: